Cognitive Dissonance, Quetzalcoatl, and the Flying Saucer People: Remembrance of Panics Past
Matthew J. Sharps
Something about the Winter Solstice, on or about December 21 every year, seems to give people the willies. It’s hard to say why. If you live on a planet, you’re going to get solstices. You can’t help it. Yet things happen around that time of year anyway. Psychological things, of considerable interest.
Things certainly happened in 1954. Prior to the Solstice of that year, a deeply interesting lady called Keech revealed that, in her opinion, she had been chosen by Superior Beings for a Special Mission of Salvation. The details came to her through Automatic Writing, which is a procedure in which you hold a pencil away from your body and write on a piece of paper, at an awkward angle which produces atypical handwriting, while either pretending, or perhaps actually believing, that somebody else is really doing the writing.
Anyway, quite a few Spirits and Space Aliens apparently kept writing Automatically to Keech, and what they had to say was that God was going to cause an enormous flood, which was going to wipe out her bit of the United States. As time went on, the informative supernatural entities expanded this theme; the flood was going to wipe out the state, or the continent, or maybe the world or something, but at least Keech and any followers she could drum up would be saved from a watery grave. This was because Space Aliens were going to rescue her and her Disciples, if any, in Flying Saucers (of course they had Flying Saucers). The aliens would then carry the True Believers safely off to the attractively-named Planet Clarion. (Clarion is now the name of a hotel chain. I’ve stayed there. They don’t have space aliens. I checked.)
But anyway, Keech somehow attracted a number of Followers. Some were mystical types, as Keech believed herself to be. A few power struggles even occurred as Keech and the other Mystics tried to demonstrate who was more enlightened, or at least more beloved of the Clarion Flying Saucer people and the other Spiritual Entities who kept popping up. But Keech wound up essentially winning these otherworldly competitions, so her followers kept on following.
It wasn’t only fellow mystics who followed Keech. A number of more conventional members of the community bought into the Keech affair in a very big way. Many of them sacrificed property, careers, and relationships to the gospel according to Keech and to the dream of Clarion Salvation. And in the wake of these major sacrifices, they all got ready for the Big Night.
So, on the solstice, the whole lot, all the True Believers, were gathered in Keech’s residence, awaiting the arrival of the Flying Saucer People. They waited until the appointed hour when…
…nothing happened.
Of course nothing happened. Nothing ever happens. Well, okay, lots of things happen, but they’re virtually never what we predict. This is because humans can’t predict the future. Having survived the 20th century, I never thought I’d have to spend the 21st explaining that humans can’t predict the future in anything but trivial ways (tomorrow’s weather, and so on). But in any significant way, we can’t predict the future. If you doubt this, watch the news sometime.
But meanwhile, back in 1954, nothing happened, and nothing continued to happen. Keech’s followers tensed in anticipation. It didn’t help. More nothing continued to happen. Keech started to cry.
Sobbing is perhaps not the most inspiring sign in your Spiritual Leader, but fortunately Keech suddenly got a new message, once again in Automatic Writing. This one, according to Keech, anyway, was from God Himself. Keech said that God was very impressed by how wonderful her followers had been in… well… hanging around with Keech. So, based on this group achievement, God Himself had decided not to cap humanity’s collective keister after all, and He’d cancelled the apocalyptic flood. So said Keech. She and her Disciples had saved the world from damp and squishy death, essentially just by sitting around her house in a faithful manner during the dreaded Solstice.
Now, if you think you could sell this story of Flood Salvation by Sitting Around to an eight year old, you may not be in contact with very high-quality eight year olds. Could any adult believe such an obvious set of lies, or delusions, or whatever they were?
The answer is a resounding Yes.
Not only did Keech’s followers believe her, but they began to proselytize her beliefs with increasing fervor and intensity. Some gave up careers and family connections, important and beloved relationships, to spread the Gospel according to Keech and the Clarion No-Show Flying Saucer People.
So said psychologist Leon Festinger, who, with his colleagues Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter, wrote a wonderful book about the Keech affair, When Prophecy Fails (reprinted 2011, Blacksburg, VA, USA, Wilder Publications). Festinger and his research group studied the Keech phenomenon from the very beginning. It was Festinger who bestowed the pseudonym of Keech upon the lady in question, and who laid out the principle upon which the whole thing rested: cognitive dissonance.
There are an amazing number of ways to define and discuss cognitive dissonance, but I personally prefer the simplest and most pithy rendition: in its simplest form, cognitive dissonance can be taken to mean that the more you pay for something, the more you tend to value it.
Suppose I go to an art sale, perhaps at a Clarion hotel. I buy two original Rembrandts. For one I pay forty million dollars. For the other, I pay $19.95 plus tax. I bring them home, prop them artistically against my pickup truck in the driveway, and call for my wife to view them. At which point she explains they’re both fakes, forgeries, because let’s face it, there are pieces of gravel in the driveway with more artistic sensibility than I possess.
Do I believe her? Well, okay, the $19.95 painting may not be a real Rembrandt, but at least it’s in the style of Rembrandt– dogs wearing hats playing poker, with a clock in the upper left-hand corner- I mean, Rembrandt painted that kind of thing all the time, right? (I believe I mentioned that I, personally, pretty much have the artistic temperament of kelp). But anyway, I accept the inauthenticity of this painting, and I hang my fake Rembrandt in the garage for occasional aesthetic enjoyment. And also to tell the time.
But the forty million dollar one? NO WAY IT’S FAKE- that’s a genuine Rembrandt. I mean, Rembrandt’s favorite oeuvre was a crying clown riding a unicycle while holding balloons, RIGHT? And you can even see the special Rembrandt numbers under the light-colored paint-
Okay. It’s a paint-by-numbers clown picture from a cheap hobby shop kit. It’s a fake. But, I can’t possibly acknowledge that painfully obvious fact. I paid too much for that to be true, at least for me. I have cognitive dissonance– at that multimillion dollar price, the painting has to be real. So, for me, it’s a Rembrandt clown picture, and it always will be- because I’ve paid too much not to value it at face value. This is true cognitive dissonance.
If you don’t believe me, talk to friends and acquaintances of mine in the Italian police agencies. There are many wonderful artistic antiquities in Italy, worth a great deal of money, and so quite a lot of people keep stealing them. But apparently, and more than a few times, Italian officers have been called out to antiquities thefts, painting or sculpture, only to find that the Precious Antiquity which was stolen is actually a complete fake– the real one is languishing in the basement of a billionaire in Gstaad, and the only reason the stolen item was ever believed to be the real thing was the cognitive dissonance of art historians, curators, and owners- they’d paid too much, in money or professional reputation, to be wrong. So, for the historians, the curators, and the owners, the stolen fake is real. Forever.
This kind of cognitive dissonance happens more often than you would think. It happens today.
In 2012, much of the world expected (oddly enough, around the Winter Solstice) that the World was going to end. This had to do with the Mayan Calendar. The Maya of Yucatan (and points adjacent) had a sophisticated calendar which went round and round; and one of the big Rounds was scheduled to end in 2012.
The Maya themselves apparently believed that this would simply be a new zero-point on their calendar, somewhat akin to December 31 on a modern calendar, with the whole cyclical system starting up again at that point. Unfortunately, not that many modern people were conversant with this concept, so lots of them started predicting the End of the World at this “end” of the Mayan Calendar.
The Mexica (Aztec)/Maya mythology of Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan was part of a highly sophisticated belief system, laden with metaphor and hidden meanings, and requiring considerable education on the part of believers, and even more on the part of priests, to interpret these elaborate ideas. But the symbolic representations of the deeper truths of this religion could easily be taken out of context, as they have been many times, in many faiths; and the results of this superficial analysis may appear ridiculous to those outside the given religious tradition.
Now, the surface structure of Mayan mythology discusses the deeds of Quetzalcoatl (Kukulkan) who apparently did something horrendous that violated his own high standards of behavior. So, he exiled himself from Cem Anahuac, the one world (essentially Central America and Mexico), to sail East to the sunrise on his raft of sacred snakes. But he vowed to return.
Now, you have to take your glasses off and squint at the chalkboard a bit for this to work, but supposedly Quetzalcoatll-Kukulkan vowed to come back on a date you might think was the Solstice, 2012.
Yet if you take this rich mythology at a superficial and literal level, the whole thing becomes a little hard to believe. For modern believers, in 2012, Quetzalcoatl was supposedly going to surf ashore in the Yucatan, on the same raft of 600 year-old wet angry snakes he took off with. (I like to think that each snake was wearing a little Scuba mask and a snorkel). Then Quetzalcoatl was essentially going to tuck his ancient-angry-snake-surfboard under his arm, run up a convenient beach dune, and deliver a sermon, the basic message of which was to be “STOP BEING MEAN!”
Good on ya, Quetzalcoatl. Right. We never would’ve thought of that. Let’s try that for a bit. Right.
But this was supposed to be the Global Harmonic Convergence, for lots and lots of college-educated people. Many modern people who’d never given any serious attention to the subject somehow decided that they understood the Ancient Mayans, based on the fact that, well, they were cool. The whole Global Convergence thing, whatever it was, was going to Change Everything Forever, despite the fact that you couldn’t sell this weird bastardization of a genuine and important religious tradition to any bright eight year-old you’d care to name.
Yet in my own laboratory research on this phenomenon, we found that about one-third of our college students, presumably scientifically literate people, believed this would probably happen; and a little over one tenth believed that these completely impossible events were certain to happen, definitely going to happen, waterproof 600 year-old sacred snakes and all! The Winter Solstice of 2021 was going to Change Everything Forever, which would be good for the Enlightened ones, and presumably very bad for everyone who’d ever been mean to them.
And so the world waited. And then, as always, on the Winter Solstice of 2012… nothing happened.
Of course not; and you’d assume that the one third of our college students who believed these bizarre fantasies at a lukewarm level, or the ten percent of our college students who endorsed these ideas with fervent certainty, would have backed off and considered their life choices.
But they didn’t.
After nothing at all happened, we found that nearly one third of our research respondents were still convincedthat the whole End of the World/Quetzalcoatl thing was probably still in the offing, and the same ten-odd percent who were absolutely convinced of it were still absolutely convinced. It was going to happen.
Yet nothing happened. No Quetzalcoatl/Kukulkan. No snakes with little scuba masks. Nothing.
Yet modern, reasonably educated people found their opinions of these fantastic and unrealized events completely unshaken. It’s all going to happen, any minute now, don’t you worry. One third of modern people endorsed these bizarre beliefs; and one person in ten was absolutely certain of their immediate reality.
What we’re seeing here is the fabulous power of cognitive dissonance. Once we have a solid investment in something, an investment in terms of time, money, or emotional commitment, we may believe in it with a soul-searing and absolute commitment, no matter how bizarre it may be.
This is a critical psychological dynamic that anyone involved in the judicial, political, or scholarly domain might productively take into account; but in the realm of the serious investigator of paranormal ideation, who may deal with witnesses who believe absolutely in their accounts of the improbable or perhaps the impossible, cognitive dissonance assumes an epic importance. Human belief systems, perhaps especially those which have been misinterpreted or bowdlerized from older, perhaps richer traditions, can influence human observations and interpretations in ways which range from the erroneous to the catastrophic; and once we have a strong personal investment, in money, time, or belief in erroneous intellectual systems, cognitive dissonance can set in to prevent rejection or even correction of some astonishingly weird and inaccurate concepts.
The history of science demonstrates rather clearly that it is hubristic at best to claim that nature has been fully characterized, at this time, by means of the scientific method. There are always new things to learn, and some things that are “paranormal” today may have sound scientific explanations tomorrow. There are many examples of formerly “magic” things that today are chemistry and physics. Imagine weird voices coming out of a little box, a couple of hundred years ago. It’s a good bet that it would have been taken for Evil Sorcery. Today it’s just your cell phone.
Butfor genuinely new discoveries to be taken seriously, their characterization must be as free as possible from sources of psychological bias, especially on the part of the discoverers. One of the most powerful of these sources may lie in the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance; but in order to resist its influence, we must be aware that it, and related phenomena, exist at all, and that these processes may have profound effects on the scientific observation and interpretation of real-world phenomena, both in relatively prosaic spheres of inquiry and in the realms of the currently unknown.
References
Festinger, L., Riecken, H., & Schachter, S. (1956, reprinted 2011). When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World. Blacksburg, VA: Wilder Publications.
Sharps, M.J., Liao, S.W., & Herrera, M.R. (2013). It’s the end of the world, and they don’t feel fine: The psychology of December 21, 2012. Skeptical Inquirer, 37, January/February, 34-39.
This article is Copyright Dr. Matthew J. Sharps, all rights reserved. It was initially published in The Next Truth magazine, Editor Maria Anna van Driel.